[206] The use of the word in Epictetus is especially instructive: δόγματα fill a large place in his philosophy. They are the inner judgments of the mind (κρίματα ψυχῆς, Diss. 4. 11. 7) in regard to both intellectual and moral phenomena. They are especially relative to the latter. They are the convictions upon which men act, the moral maxims which form the ultimate motives of action and the resolution to act or not act in a particular case. They are the most personal and inalienable part of us. See especially, Diss. 1. 11. 33, 35, 38; 17. 26; 29. 11, 12; 2. 1. 21, 32; 3. 2. 12; 9. 2; Ench. 45. Hence ἀπὸ δογμάτων λαλεῖν, “to speak from conviction,” is opposed to ἀπὸ τῶν χειλῶν λαλεῖν, “to speak with the lip only,” Diss. 3. 16. 7. If a man adopts the δόγμα of another person, e.g. of a philosopher, so as to make it his own, he is said, δόγματι συμπαθῆσαι, “to feel in unison with the conviction,” Diss. 1. 3. 1. Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrh. Hypot. 1. 13, distinguishes two philosophical senses of δόγμα, (1) assent to facts of sensation, τὸ εὐδοκεῖν τινι πράγματι, (2) assent to the inferences of the several sciences: in either sense it is (a) a strictly personal feeling, and (b) a firm conviction, not a mere vague impression: it was in the latter of the two senses that the philosophers of research laid it down as their maxim, μὴ δογματίζειν: they did away, not with τὰ φαινόμενα, but with assertions about them, ibid. 1. 19, 22: their attitude in reference to τὰ ἄδηλα was simply οὐχ ὁρίζω, “I abstain from giving a definition of them,” ibid. 1. 197, 198.
[207] Sext. Empir. Pyrrh. Hypot. 1. 3.
[208] Ibid. 4, δογματική, ἀκαδημαϊκή, σκεπτική.
[209] For example, Sextus Empiricus, in spite of his constant formula, οὐχ ὁρίζω, maintains the necessity of having definable conceptions, τῶν ἐννοουμένων ἡμῖν πραγμάτων τὰς οὐσίας ἐπινοεῖν ὀφείλομεν, and he argues that it is impossible for a man to have an ἔννοια of God because He has no admitted οὐσία, Pyrrh. Hypot. 3. 2, 3.
[210] Origen, c. Cels. 3. 44: see also the references given in Keim, Celsus’ wahres Wort, pp. 11, 40.
[211] Origen, c. Cels. 1. 9.
[212] Apol. i. 20.
[213] De testim. animæ, 1.
[214] Apol. 46.
[215] Apol. 2. 13.